Howard Barrell
The Mail & Guardian’s third-largest shareholder, British-based Joel Joffe, has been made a baron in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List in recognition of his work for good causes, which include his chairmanship of Oxfam.
Lord Joffe – as he is now known – was also the lawyer for Nelson Mandela and others accused in the Treason Trial in the 1950s. He later settled in Britain, where he continued his link with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, becoming a trustee of the Canon Collins Educational Trust and the Legal Assistance Trust.
Joffe has been a trustee of Oxfam, the R1,25-billion-a-year charity which operates in about 60 countries, for 18 years.
Since the end of apartheid, Joffe has spent several extended periods in South Africa which have included a spell as chief executive of The Weekly Mail, the M&G’s predecessor, and later as a special adviser to former minister of transport Mac Maharaj, trying to clear up corruption in the Road Traffic Accident Fund.
“My job at the newspaper was to help it survive after it tried to go daily in 1990. It survived – just,” he said this week.
Others who stepped in and took shareholdings in the paper at the time included Lord (David) Sainsbury, now a minister in the British Cabinet, Lord Palumbo, a major British property developer, and Sir Mark Weinberg, another South African based in the United Kingdom. The M&G’s largest shareholder is now The Guardian Media Group, owner of The Guardian of London.
Joffe said this week that when he heard he was about to be ennobled he had considered asking to be known as “Lord Joffe of Doornfontein” – in tribute to the suburb of Johannesburg where he had spent many of his younger years.
“But I was told that any place that became part of a title had to be in the UK. So I am plain `Lord Joffe’.”
Joffe said that when he had first arrived in the UK, he had hoped to emigrate to Australia. The Australian government had given him an assisted passage but, before he could take advantage of it, the then apartheid government withdrew his South African passport. He was stymied. The conservative Australian government of the day, led by Sir Robert Menzies – which maintained close security ties with South Africa – then refused to allow him to travel to Australia.
“They obviously didn’t want another communist Jew,” he says.
Though not in fact a communist, Joffe was very much of the left. He now found himself in a fix.
“My South African legal qualification as an attorney counted for nothing in England. I did not know what to do,” he says of that time.
“Mark Weinberg offered me a job. He, I and another partner then formed an insurance company, Allied Dunbar.” The rest is British business history. Joffe and the others made a considerable amount of money. Much of it found its way to charitable and other good causes. So, too, did very many hours of Joffe’s considerable business skills.
Formerly exiled South African journalist and author Colin Legum describes Joffe as “the most wonderfully generous, modest man I have ever known”.
Others have been similarly impressed by him. “The word `philanthropist’ could have been invented to describe him,” said another former collaborator of his in charitable projects.